the war by angeli

the war by angeli - May 2017 Scholarship Essay

JD Salinger wrote many books that hold hidden themes and messages. The story that i was most influenced by and interested in would be the story, Just Before the War with the Eskimos from Nine Stories. The overrall message of the story is something that is rejection, or the relationship between children and adults.
In Just Before the War with the Eskimos, the two main characters, Ginnie and Franklin, together create the theme of the relationship between children and adults. Throughout majority of the story, these two characters were having a conversation about many different things, but mainly problems that were occurring in Franklin's life. This conversation compares the life of an adult and a child. As Franklin talks about his problems on not getting into the war and not being mailed back by Ginnie's older sister, you begin to see how petty Ginnie's problem of needing the owed taxi fare from Selena is. This also compares adults and children and shows their similarities which Franklin and Ginnie do have, but have not noticed: they both go through rejection.
Franklin has some obvious rejections such as being rejected from fighting in the war and rejected by a women that he clearly (even though he denies it) has feelings for. The rejection they both contain would be the rejection from society. What i have realized from personal experience is that usually someone that has been rejected from society, acts as if they never wanted to be apart of society in the first place. In the story, Franklin looks out of the window and "looks down" on the people that walk by and says "Look at 'em, Goddam fools". Although he may say these things about the people of society, i have learned that it is only a gaurd to pretend that it hasn't already hurt or rejected you and also to prevent it from further hurting you. Ginnie on the other reminds me of myself, which is why i am able to see the way she was rejected, even though it was not clearly stated. Ginnie has a problem with friendships, which may come from having a bad experience with making friends or stablizing relationships. Although Ginnie denies that Selena is her friend, she actually wants Selena to be her friend, and this is shown by the actions such as spotting her for the taxi fare, sharing a taxi with her for weeks, and actually beginning to feel sympathy when Selena told the story about her mother being sick. As a defense mechanism or a way to protect herself, Ginnie says that Selena is not her friend and pretends as if she doesn't care about her mothers illness. When Ginnie does these things to "protect herself", she is becoming something that society would not want to deal with, which is a snob or an asshole. After Ginnie listens to Franklin's problems, she sees the similarites between them and realizes that she doesnt want to end up as miserable as he is, so she goes through an immediate change (although in reality this change takes a while). She first denies the money from Selena, realizing that she needs to let people in and when she leaves the building and looks at the sandwich in her pocket, but instead of throwing it away, she keeps it there. This is when she decides not to treat the sandwich like society treats her, and just throw it away before fully tasting it. The last symbol i found would be the Easter chick. This took me a while to understand but then i realized that it represents her, or all of the rejected. This is a message to society: when you reject someone its like they have been thrown in the trash, and like the poor Easter chick, the rejected is not recognized until it is too late.

This has to change...